The present invention relates to a partitioned image processing system for processing image data in an image processing device and, more particularly, to a partitioned image processing system which permits the image processing of a large region by partitioning the image data, processing the partitioned image data, and subjecting the image data in the partitioned regions to connection processing to connect the partitioned regions.
Heretofore, image processing devices such as computer aided design apparatuses are designed so as to extract various shapes from a drawing in which various line segments are present and to classify them into line drawing elements when drawing data is processed by digitizing a line drawing. As a pre-processing of the image processing at this time, the image data is processed for conversion into polygonal line data. More specifically, when line drawing data is read by a scanner and input in a image data file, the image data input in the image data file is stored in an image memory in a processing unit, thus processing for converting the image data into the polygonal line data.
As technology advances to a high degree, a line drawing sought to be processed by image processing devices such as computer aided design apparatuses becomes lager and larger so that such image processing devices have been desired to have a capacity for processing a large scale of drawing data.
It is to be noted, however, that there is a limit upon the memory capacity of an image memory in a processing unit of image processing devices, thus leading to a limit upon a size of a drawing that can be processed by reading in the image memory at the same time. For instance, in executing the polygonal line processing for converting image data of a line drawing into polygonal line data, a large number of the image data to be converted into the polygonal line data should be stored in an image memory of the processing unit and processed at the same time. However, an amount of the image data which can be subjected to the polygonal line processing is also restricted so that the image memory should be provided with a memory capacity in accordance with such a large amount of the image data when the image data to be processed into a polygonal line data is rendered large. Thus this presents the problem that the data of a large drawing cannot be subjected to the image processing.